ESPHome is great for most use cases.

But there are things they won't touch it seems, like LoRa support.

Also I might be wrong but so far I don't think you can leverage cool things like ESP-NOW (yet).

It ends up losing contact with home assistant regularly for me. All my devices do this (all based on 8266's anyway) and all devices will fall into unavailable for a few seconds. Which is annoying because their return can trigger automations.

Honestly? Nowhere where an ESP32 was a suitable device. Anything that esphome can’t do generally requires more powerful or specialized hardware anyways. I did have some issues with updates killing WiFi on the boards and needing a reflash but I think they fixed that bug. I could also never get the chrome based flasher to work properly when I tried that out.

I've found it to be nearly unusable. The opaque firmware generation is an anti-feature IMO. It also doesn't fucking work. If you change the config, you have to force a full clean and rebuild or you'll get a corrupt image. Building an esp firmware image from scratch takes several minutes every time you want to change a config.

All of the provided controls are bad. It's incredibly difficult to get it on the network. The documentation is laughable.

It took me three hours to get a simple RGB strip working. All it had to do was drive three PWM signals. The esp has hardware specifically for that. It took a lot of effort to even find out how to use the LEDC hardware, much less how to assign a pin and hook it to the color picker.

I also wanted to hang an IR LED off it to control my TV and such. No sort of configurable button panel, you get one giant widget per action.

I did eventually get it working, but honestly it would have been so much faster to just write my own firmware to talk to HA directly.